O Absalom, my son
Sermon by Jamie Howison on 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
This sermon cites the lyrics of a song by Pierce Pettis, called “Absalom, Absalom.” A recording of the song by Steve Bell from his 2011 album Kindness is included at the end of the podcast.
We continue to make our way through the stories of King David as told in these biblical books of First and Second Samuel, and this week the lectionary has made a massive leap from where we left off last Sunday. That is understandable, of course, as otherwise we’d be reading our way through these stories for six months rather than just two, but there is much that needs to be summarized here in order for tonight’s story to make sense.
For those who love to read historical fiction, or who are moved by the tragedies of Shakespeare or maybe fans of the “Game of Thrones” books and television series, you need to know that these stories rival all of those in drama, scandal, and political intrigue. These are not tidy religious stories of cardboard characters that bring easy resolution or simplistic spiritual lessons. These are rough edged stories of fallible and wounded people; theologically driven stories that dare to unflinchingly critique kingship, power, and hypocrisy, even at the price of revealing the brokenness of the most beloved protagonist, King David himself.
Last Sunday I said that while David is forgiven for what he has done to Bathsheba and Uriah, he still had to live with the consequences of those actions and of the way he has failed to do real justice to his family. I characterized this as having less to do with punishment per se, and more with the raw consequences that fall from the sort of husband and father and king that David has become. That is precisely what is told in the chapters which the lectionary skips over.
That skipped section begins by introducing the reader to Amnon, David’s eldest son and heir to the throne. “Some time passed,” it says at the beginning of 2nd Samuel 13. “David’s son Absalom had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar; and David’s son Amnon fell in love with her.” To be clear, Tamar is David’s daughter from one of his wives, while Amnon is his son from a different wife. Amnon has fallen in love with his half-sister; or maybe not so much love as a raw sexual desire. The writer says that Amnon was “so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar,” which sounds very little like real love to me.
Well, Amnon goes to Tamar and he rapes her, and after he is done he begins to despise her, the writer saying that he “was seized with a very great loathing for her; indeed, his loathing was even greater than the lust he had felt for her.” That is a truly repugnant description, isn’t it? And what of Tamar? She is devastated, effectively cast out of her own home by Amnon, left to wear the clothing of a mourner. But she does have one ally and friend in the person of her full brother Absalom. Absalom takes Tamar into his home, and because their father David fails to do anything in response to Amnon’s assault on Tamar, Absalom’s anger brews. It is fully two years later that he has his soldiers kill Amnon, which the puts Absalom in a very precarious position with his father. He flees, and it is another three years before he is allowed to return to Jerusalem, and two more before he is forgiven and welcomed back into his father David’s household.
One would hope that the reconciliation of father and son—a reconciliation that reads very much like the parable of the prodigal son in the text—would mark the beginning of peace in David’s family, but that is not to be. There is something ominous about how the narrator describes the Absalom, right before he reconciles with his father: “Now in all Israel there was no one to be praised so much for his beauty as Absalom; from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.” (2 Sam. 14:25) Yet what had been the warning about relying too much on physical appearance after handsome King Saul had been discredited? The Lord doesn’t see as mortals see, for the Lord looks on the heart, not on outward appearances.
And indeed all is not well, for Absalom continues to brood, and in time becomes aware that his own popularity is growing in the areas outside of Jerusalem, and so he slowly begins to mount a rebellion against his father, that will turn into a full civil war. David and his loyal soldiers must flee from Jerusalem—the city of David, no less—which Absalom and his soldiers then occupy. It is not a pretty picture.
What Absalom has not reckoned with, however, is the military skill of his father and the deep loyalty of those soldiers. It isn’t all that long before a great battle is waged in the forest of Ephraim, which will be decisively won by David’s forces. But did you catch the last thing that David said to his officers before they set out to the forest? “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.”
But they don’t. As we heard in tonight’s reading, “Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak. His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth.” Discovered there by Joab’s armour-bearers, the young man is quickly put to death and word is carried back to David by a messenger, telling him that the civil war has been effectively crushed.
Of this picture of Absalom being caught in the branches of a tree, Walter Brueggemann comments,
[T]he description of Absalom’s entrapment in the tree, by the hair of his head, is given in a very difficult text. The Hebrew is obscure. That obscurity may reflect the reticence of the narrator or the inability of the tradition to express what in fact happened, because it is so dark and ominous.
To this Brueggemann adds,
Absalom hangs “between heaven and earth” [which] suggests the narrator is speaking of more than Absalom’s physical condition. Absalom is suspended between life and death, between the sentence of a rebel and the value of a son, between the severity of the king and the yearning of the father.
To which I would add that David, too, is similarly suspended between “the severity of the king and the yearning of the father.” He knows well his brilliance as a military king and commander, but has also had to confront his profound failings as a father and a husband. His “Deal gently… with the young man Absalom” was a last-ditch effort to somehow make up for those failings, but it was ignored by battle-savvy soldiers who knew that such mercy was not going to win this war. Broken now, David weeps and utters his anguished lament of “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
Some of you will be familiar with a song written by Pierce Pettis and recorded by Steve Bell on his 2011 album Kindness. Steve is away from the city on vacation right now, otherwise I would have invited him to play that song as part of this sermon. I’ll include the recording on the podcast of this sermon and would encourage you to give it a listen when it is released tomorrow. For now, I will read to you the lyrics, which stand as a kind of poetic sermon all on their own. This is “Absalom, Absalom” by Pierce Pettis:
Come and smear me
With the branches from that tree
Hyssop dipped in innocent blood
To make me clean
Let an old man’s broken bones
Once more rejoice
Absalom, you were my little boy
Absalom, Absalom
My son, my son, my son
Caught in the tangles of deceit
Hanging lifeless from that tree
Absalom, Absalom
My son, my son, my son
Caught in the tangles of your hair
The fruit of my own sin to bear
O Absalom
You were the laughing boy
Who bounced upon my knee
You learned to play the harp
And use the shepherd’s sling
Always watching my impressionable son
O Absalom, what have I done
You were watching
When I took a good man’s wife
And gave the order for his murder
Just to cover up my crime
All the vanity, cruel arrogance and greed
O Absalom, you learned it all from me
Detail from a painting by Marc Chagall
Such a moving portrait of a broken-hearted king, weeping as he confronts the cost of his own failings. In the next chapter Joab will come to David and tell him to get up, dry his tears, wash his face, and go out into the public to let the people know he is alive and well, and glad his soldiers are alive and victorious. Claim your kingship, David. It is what Israel needs.
And so David does, and order is slowly restored to the land. But the scribes who have told this story need Israel to know that none of this has come without a great cost. There is a painful truth to this man David, no question, and unless Israel is willing to tell that story in its fullness, they won’t be able to tell the deeper story of God’s dream, not only for them, but for all of humanity. They need to know that even their greatest king bears deep, deep wounds, and that the true and lasting kingdom will not and cannot be built by human hands. Israel—like us—needs to learn to turn more steadfastly to God and God’s steadfastness. When we do turn toward God’s steadfastness, we have a fighting chance of not falling into the kind of painful truth David confronted in himself. When we turn to God’s steadfastness, we are also gifted with a faith that says that when we do fall and find ourselves reduced to tears in face of what we’ve wrought, we will be raised from our knees, feel our tears wiped from our faces, and set again on our stumbling way of redemption.
